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Comic Review: Death of Wolverine – Logan Legacy 1-7

Oh look, it’s yet another Death of Wolverine tie-in mini-series. Anyone surprised? Actually, there is one more after this and I think we’re done. Sort of. Mostly. But we’ll get to that later.

This time around, we have a 7-issue mini that explores five of Wolverine’s enemies and what they thought of him. Kinda. But let’s get busy taking a look at The Logan Legacy, shall we?

In essence, this is five independent issues about five separate characters with a two-issue wrap-around. When Sabretooth, Daken, X-23, Mystique and Lady Deathstrike get kidnapped and stuffed into a box together, they each recount their individual memories of Logan. Why? Because apparently, Abraham Cornelius had kidnapped them all, done some kind of evil experiment on them and implanted four control words into their brains. Their kidnapper knows those words, but wants their help before he’ll tell them how to remove them. It’s really kind of stupid and this whole mini-series is just a lead-in to a whole different series called Wolverines.

Unfortunately, none of these stories are particularly good and none of them really have anything to do with each other. It’s just “I remember Wolverine” and none of it is really connected to the wrap-around storyline. Each issue is written and drawn by a different team. The first and last is written by Charles Soule, who came up with the whole Death of Wolverine thing in the first place. Some issues are better done than others, some are just bad, it’s really hard to review this mini without going into detail on the individual issues and I really don’t want to do that. Suffice it to say that each of the middle issues is just a slice-of-life of one villain and Logan, either some memory or some encounter, none of it really that exciting in and of itself. For instance, after Wolverine’s death, supposedly whatever parts they could find of him were hacked off and are being offered for auction. Daken, the son of Wolverine, but usually a crazed killer, goes to shut down the auction because he doesn’t want anyone messing with his father’s remains. The Mystique issue deals with Wolverine stopping her and Destiny from taking over Madripoor in the early 1970s. You get the idea.

Anyhow, it turns out that the four super-beings that kidnapped our villains were the same characters we see in the Death of Wolverine: Weapon X Program book, the last one I have to review. If you’re not reading both titles, you’ll never have a clue because it isn’t explained very well here. Now we know that Marvel doesn’t much care about continuity most of the time because, according to Weapon X Program #4, which came out at the same time as Logan Legacy #7, the four characters aren’t even in the same place. Skel is in Cleveland and Neuro and Sharp are in New Orleans. None of them are supposed to be in Croatia, which is where all of this happens. Add that to the fact that X-23, in her current place in All-New X-Men, is in the Ultimate Universe, not the 616-universe at all! There are too many things here that really make no sense. I mean, Madripoor wasn’t even a place in the Marvel Universe in 1974, it wasn’t created until 1985 when it appeared in an issue of New Mutants. This kind of silly retroactive continuity is a bit absurd.

Worse, as I said earlier, this is really just a set-up for the Wolverines comic, so it isn’t even a complete story, the end of issue #7 ends with “to be continued…” and that’s always a bummer. That’s a lot of money, almost $30, to spend for a “to be continued…” ending.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the whole Death of Wolverine story and I haven’t been particularly impressed by any of the connected mini-series that have come along afterwards. It comes off as nothing more than a cash-grab, a bunch of issues that are only tangentially connected while we all wait for the inevitable return of Wolverine. What’s the point? It really seems like nobody planned well for this, Marvel just thought they could make a bunch of extra money by making tie-in books as an afterthought. Surely this couldn’t have been pre-planned, it would have come together much better if it had.